Cultural semiotics is a holistic approach to understanding how culture generates new meanings. It views culture as a complex system of interconnected meanings called a "semiosphere" by Yuri Lotman. The semiosphere facilitates the exchange of meanings across space and time within a permeable boundary. Lotman saw the semiosphere both as the space where meaning occurs and as a participant in an ongoing dialogue that establishes shared meanings and generates new meanings for culture over time through cultural memory.

1. What is Cultural Semiotics? Wilma Clark April 2008 Linguistics Semantics Semiotics Social Semiotics Cultural Semiotics Discourse Multimodality

2. The Theoretical Field Pierce: Saussure: Barthes: Kristeva: Halliday: Hodge & Kress: Fairclough, Foucault: Hall et al. Kress & van Leeuwen: semiosis semiology mythologies intertextuality language as social semiotic social semiotics discourse analysis cultural studies multimodal discourse

3. What is Cultural Semiotics? Cultural Semiotics is a holistic approach to the problem of meaning generation. Lotman defines ‘meaning generation’ as the ability of culture, both as a whole and as the sum of its parts, to generate, as ‘output’, nontrivial new texts. For this, he coined the term semiosphere – a modelling system, characterised by permeable boundary structures, to facilitate a mapping of the contexts of culture (semiospheres)

4. Yuri Lotman: Semiosphere The space of semiosis A multi-layered, interconnected ‘web’ of meaning Both participant in, and the space of, dialogue

5. Yuri Lotman: Semiosphere and Culture Operating across space and time Cultural memory Establishes meaning and generates new meanings

6. Yuri Lotman: Visualising semiosphere How do we filter meanings? Cultural memory – why do we see what we see? How do we make connections that generate new meanings?